Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
One of the most significant advances in the computing field in recent years has been the advent and widespread deployment of touch-sensitive input technology. Such technology is now commonly used to facilitate user input in countless devices and systems, such as mobile phones, tablet computers, gaming systems, home theater systems, vehicle dashboards, and customer kiosks for instance.
Two of the more typical implementations of touch-sensitive input technology are touch screens and touch pads. In general, a touch screen integrates a touch-sensitive input surface with a display screen, so that a user can touch and interact directly with displayed indicia in much the same way that a user would touch and interact with real-world objects such as buttons or the like. A touch pad, on the other hand, typically exists separately from but in association with a display screen, and typically functions to allow touch interaction as a replacement for a mouse or other cursor control device for instance.
In practice, a touch-sensitive input surface may employ any of a variety of mechanisms to sense touch and provide a corresponding output, so that a computing system can then take action in response to the detected touch. Examples of such mechanisms include, without limitation resistive sensors, capacitive sensors, and surface acoustic wave sensors.